Saturday, March 25, 2006
(11:12 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Theses on "The Higher Eclecticism"
By now we are all hopefully acquainted with the Holbonic category of "the Higher Eclecticism." It is a complex category, but I believe it is capable of analysis. There are two main points:- The Higher Eclecticism relies too heavily on arguments from various authorities that are contradictory among themselves, and thus is incoherent and non-serious.
- Higher Eclecticists are romantics who resent the patient work of scholarship; thus they do not draw on each other's results; everyone is always starting from scratch, such that they end up getting nowhere.
The highest erudition (thesis) coincides with the highest levels of anti-intellectual romanticism (antithesis), producing the Higher Eclecticism -- a synthesis, but what Zizek might call a "downward synthesis," denoting not a harmonization of the two poles, but rather bodying forth the irreducible deadlock between the two (italics in original). So complaining that this concept is incoherent misses the mark -- the incoherent concept corresponds precisely to the incoherent reality itself.
What is the next step in this dialectic? The answer is clear. In response to the inherent deadlock of literary study (the Higher Eclecticism, the "thesis"), a reactionary movement arises (antithesis). But this counter-move is at first devoid of content aside from the very rejection of the Higher Eclecticism, more commonly called "Theory" -- it can only be called "anti-Theory," and its concept (and reality) reflects the inherent deadlock of the Higher Eclecticism in inverted form. Beneath the claims of real "love of literature," the opponents of the Higher Eclecticism are beautiful souls with no capacity to move literary study forward -- thus "love of literature" is emptied of all possible content and coincides with the incoherent rejection of the incoherent Higher Eclecticism.
How is it possible to resolve this deadlock? Precisely through reference to what is taken to be the very opposite of literary study -- scientific quantitative methods. To the love of literature, then, corresponds a method that counts books instead of reading them. Or to put it differently: the only way to save literary theory from the anti-method of constant reference to anti-authoritative authorities that have distracted from "the love of literature" is to take the impossible paradoxical step of doing away with literary study altogether insofar as that study could consider itself to be literary.
Does this not precisely reflect the Lacanian logic of sacrifice? In the first step, one is willing to sacrifice everything, all the trappings of academic authority, "for the cause" (in this case, a "genuine" literary study) -- get rid of presumptuous literary theories, fundamentally rework the enterprise of academic publishing, get literary scholars blogging, etc. But the next step is precisely to sacrifice the cause itself. And just as only an outsider can truly deploy the inherent logic of a thinker's position -- only Lacan, who never met Freud personally, could preserve the subversive impulse of Freud's thought; only St. Paul, who came from outside the original circle of apostles, could recognize the radical universalizing logic behind the Christ-event -- so only an analytic philosopher can think through to its end the dialectic opened up by the advent of the Higher Eclecticism. John Holbo thus becomes, paradoxically, the most faithful of all adherents of the Higher Eclecticism, precisely through his (apparent) betrayal of literary study into the hands of quantitative methods.
